Tag Archives : Big data

The iconic image of the American farmer is one who works the land, milks cows and is self-reliant enough to fix the tractor. But like a lot of mechanical items, tractors are increasingly run by computer software. Now, farmers are hitting up against an obscure provision of copyright law that makes it illegal to repair machinery run by software. Dave Alford considers himself a small farmer — he’s got 1,000 acres in San Luis Obispo along the central coast of California. “You spend so much of your time in agriculture fixing things,” Alford says. “It’s more economically beneficial to me […]

Smart agriculture and precision farming could just be the precursors to even greater use of technology in the farming world. BI Intelligence predicts that IoT device installations in the agriculture world will increase from 30 million in 2015 to 75 million in 2020, for a compound annual growth rate of 20%. The US currently leads the world in IoT smart agriculture, as it produces 7,340 kgs of cereal (e.g. wheat, rice, maize, barley, etc.) per hectare (2.5 acres) of farmland, compared to the global average of 3,851 kgs of cereal per hectare. This efficiency should only improve in the coming decades […]

In the next 20 years, the global food system will face challenges that are unprecedented in the history of agriculture – along with unprecedented opportunity to nations and organizations best equipped to meet them. This month’s Budget announcement of £12 million funding for the Centre of Agricultural Informatics and Metrics of Sustainability, now called Agrimetrics, is another milestone for the Agri-Tech Industrial Strategy – enabling our food to be produced more efficiently and sustainably while creating jobs and growing the UK economy. Agrimetrics was proposed by a consortium of leading industry and academic partners, led by Rothamsted Research, the University of Reading, Scotland’s Rural […]